22. Knox
KNOX
FOUR YEARS, TWO MONTHS AGO
“Fuck ’em all,” Jax says, handing me one of the two Solo cups he’s holding.
The beer is cheap, watered down, and tastes like piss, but it’s the only thing we could get our hands on with a liquor content that doesn’t have a mile-long line.
And right about now, I’ll take anything I can get.
I just found out my father died, and how did I hear about it?
Not from the family. Nope, not a single one of those fuckers could be bothered to pick up a phone to let me know.
Instead, I came across a three-day-old article online while scrolling on my phone.
The wake had already been held, but I thankfully hadn’t missed the funeral.
Putting on the best black clothes I could find, I headed out to Mount Hope Cemetery late this morning to confirm that my stepfamily not notifying me wasn ’ t an oversight.
The last thing I wanted to do was be anywhere near them, and I didn’t want to make a scene, so I planned to stay near the back of the crowd, but it didn’t matter.
The second Lillian saw me, she sicced her dogs on my ass. Or, more accurately, my half-brother, Devin. When I met him, we exchanged a whole four sentences with each other, but it was all I needed to know he was a dick. He regarded me with the same look his mother gives whenever I’m near.
Like a heaping, wreaking pile of trash has just been dumped in front of them.
And those sentiments haven’t changed.
He charged over to me, and if the situation was anywhere else, I would have laughed. This asshole didn’t really think he could intimidate me, right? I’d be more scared of a toothless, neutered Chihuahua.
I quickly realized that the only reason he was suddenly acting like he actually had a set of balls was because he had summoned security to remove me.
Fuck that.
I wasn’t budging. He was my old man too. I had every right to be there.
But then we both made our own mistakes.
Devin’s was getting in my face and telling me that the last thing his mother needed was to see “the bastard son of a whore at her husband’s funeral.”
My mistake was punching him…in a crowd of over two hundred people.
Hey, you speak ill of my mother, and you better be prepared to lose every one of your teeth, fucker.
Thankfully, I restricted myself to only that one punch, but our audience is what the police like to refer to as witnesses .
I know it’s only a matter of time before I get a knock on the door from Five-O.
But that’s a problem for future-me. Present-me just wants to drown my grief with cheap liquor and music so loud that I can’t hear my thoughts.
It feels like I just lost my mom yesterday, and now my old man too? I hadn’t heard from him in a couple of weeks, but that was normal. He was always traveling for business or swamped with work, so I sometimes didn’t hear from him for a month.
And of course, no one bothered to tell me he had been hospitalized from a pulmonary embolism. From what news reports claimed, it developed after he had taken a nasty fall down the stairs at the manor.
He suffered for over three days, and I had no fucking clue.
Did he know that I didn ’ t know? I can just picture Lillian and Devin assuring him that they told me what happened, and all the while, I was a no-show.
Did my father really die thinking I couldn’t be bothered to see him?
I discard my beer with the hopes of finding something stronger, because I goddamn need it. I don’t even know I’m breathing with this vice clamped around my chest.
Thanks to those fuckers, I had to return to the cemetery after everybody left to pay my respects, and once I was told to leave at sunset, I couldn’t bring myself to do anything but sit in my car, watching the rain distort my view of the street lights through the windshield.
I don’t know how long I sat there. I could remember only four times in my life when I had cried. When I broke my arm at the age of six, when my mom told me about her cancer diagnosis at the age of fourteen, last year when she passed away, and then a few hours ago.
It’s the kind of crying that hurts, that wracks your entire body until you feel like you’ve pulled every muscle in you. My eyes feel like sandpaper, my head throbs, and I’m exhausted. But I can’t fucking sleep. I’ve tried.
The best I can hope for now is to pass out from getting shitfaced.
The last thing I want to do is be in a room surrounded by people talking and laughing and so blissfully unaware of how fucked up life can be, but thanks to only being eighteen, alcohol isn’t easy for me to come by unless it’s at a party, hence why I’m at Constantine’s rager.
I’m halfway to the kitchen when screams and shouts overtake the music. People begin pushing each other out of the way, scrambling for the closest exit, which can only mean one thing.
The police are here.
Fuck.
I look back to the couch, but Jax is already one step ahead, waving at me to go out the kitchen window just before he slips out of the one in the living room. Another guy joins me, and we leap out onto the sopping wet lawn, ready to take off—
I don’t make it a foot before a flashlight shines directly into my eyes.
“Well, if it isn’t Damon Knox,” its owner declares. “Just the man I was looking for.”
He lowers the light, but it takes a good thirty seconds before the black spots in my vision lesson so that I can actually see who he is.
Yep, it’s a police officer. I’m not short, but this guy still stands several inches taller than me, is built like an ex-running back, and has the name HOLT adorning his chest. Even though I’ve never seen him before in my life, he evidently knows me… somehow.
First red flag.
The second comes immediately after when he adds, “It seems you’ve had a very busy day. How would you like to accompany me to the station?”
There’s yelling inside the house, but Five-O here doesn’t bat an eye. He caught his white whale.
But why am I of so much interest? It’s not like I coldcocked Devin. I’ve punched my friends harder when we’re just horsing around.
I know for a fact that there are several small-time drug dealers in attendance at the party. Why would this officer’s sole focus be on the guy who punched his brother during an emotional moment at their dad’s funeral?
I can only think of one reason, and it’s not good.
My father donated quite generously to the police department, and I’m not so stupid as to think that my stepmother doesn’t have connections because of it.
I heard a couple of years back about how Devin was pulled over for doing ninety in a forty.
Usually, that’s the kind of shit that gets you fines, court dates, and potential jail time, yet the jackass had to deal with none of them if what I overheard was accurate.
When you have money and connections, you can make things happen.
But my stepmother couldn’t really be that petty to use them just to have me dragged to a jail cell for the night, could she?
I know the answer to the question before I’m even done thinking it.
Of course she would. The woman hates my fucking guts.
She’s tried her best over the years in front of my father to hide it, but whenever I’ve been left alone with her, she’s let me know.
I’m not a human to her. I don’t have a name or a heartbeat.
I’m just the walking, talking, constant reminder of her husband’s infidelity.
I also know it pisses her off that I look more like my father than her son does.
Apart from inheriting my mother’s eyes, the rest of my face is nearly identical to his.
Meanwhile, Devin may as well be the red-headed stepchild, not really taking after either of his parents.
When my father introduced me to people, they never needed to be told I was his kid.
The same can’t be said about my half-brother.
And his mother loathes that fact.
I mean, fuck, the woman went Old Testament on my ass when I was fifteen, quoting Deuteronomy’s “A bastard shall not enter the congregation of the Lord” after my father invited me to Easter service.
Who the hell does that to a kid?
A bitter, vindictive bitch.
And my stepmother found the perfect lackey to do her dirty work, because Officer Holt here is enjoying himself far too immensely. The look on his face would make even the Cheshire Cat ask what the fuck he’s grinning at.
The asshole keeps shining the light in my eyes, noting, “Looking pretty bloodshot there, Mr. Knox. What kind of drugs have you been using tonight?”
“I don’t touch that shit,” I say, and I don’t. It seemed tempting when I was sixteen, but after a classmate OD’d on a contaminated batch of coke and was left brain-dead from one line, I’ve refused to go anywhere near any drug since.
The officer already has a breathalyzer in hand, demanding I blow into it.
Seeing as how I’ve only had one sip of a watered-down beer five minutes ago, it’s no shock that it comes back reading zeros across the board.
You’d think that would play out in my favor, but it just makes that stupid grin on Holt’s face falter.
He wanted to bust me for underage drinking.
And it would appear he still wants to bust me for possession of…something, because he’s ordering me to turn out my pockets. When that doesn’t yield the desired result, he begins patting me down, disappointed that the only thing on me is a few dollar bills, my phone, and my wallet.
The officer isn’t reading me my rights but still insists I follow him back to his cruiser. I ask if I’m under arrest, and all I get is, “We’ll talk about it at the car.”
People who couldn’t get out of the house and were likely hiding are now being found inside, resulting in another outburst of yelling and things crashing, so the request isn’t too outlandish as a second burst of chaos erupts.
There are two police cruisers out front, but Holt keeps escorting me down the block to the one parked at the end of the street. If he has a partner, he’s not in the car, and an uneasy feeling settles into my spine.
Every single streetlight down Allister is working, except for the one overhead. The entire area around the cruiser is bathed in shadows, made worse by the overgrown bushes impeding the sidewalk.
He tells me to go stand by them near the rear of his car, and as he follows not a foot behind me, I see the shift in his body.
He’s angling himself away from me.
Or, more accurately, he’s angling his body cam.
Shit.
Despite no one touching him, he lets out a grunt and staggers sideways, barking at me to stop.
And then he punches himself in the face.
Fuck. Me.
I do the only thing I can. I take a huge step back and raise my hands in front of me, so when he immediately turns his body back towards mine, the camera can see that I’m not doing anything.
But that doesn’t deter Holt.
“You little shit,” he spits, lunging right at me.
If I ran, I wouldn’t put it past him to shoot at me, and I know better than to fight back.
I have no choice. I let him hit me.
More often than not, you’ll find that guys built like him can’t fight for shit. Sure, they have plenty of muscle and the access to deliver a solid blow, but a good number of them have never punched anything in their lives. They don’t utilize the momentum behind them, and their technique is sloppy.
But Holt isn’t one of these people.
Honestly, is his hand carved from a cinder block?
When his fist slams into the side of my face, pain explodes throughout my entire skull, and everything goes black for a second. My brain seems to glitch because my legs give out, and I hit the sidewalk.
Any trace of light hitting me while I’m on my feet is snuffed out by the body of the cruiser, and Holt doesn’t waste the opportunity.
He’s on top of me, telling me I’m under arrest for assault, and he keeps making sounds like he’s struggling to wrestle me to the ground.
I know the body cam won’t be able to see shit, so it comes as no surprise when he punches me again.
And then I hear it.
The minimal but clear snap of the thumb break on his utility belt.
On his gun holster.
“Stop resisting,” he keeps shouting, but I’m not doing anything.
Not that anyone will ever know.
If you have a half-decent parent living in a rough area like this, you would have been taught from a young age not to fuck with the police. You don’t talk back. You don’t fight back. If you do, you’re fucked six ways to Sunday.
I’m going to die having abided by that rule. And look what good it did me.
Before another punch can be thrown or a trigger pulled, Holt is suddenly torn off of me. He goes hurtling backward, landing on the sidewalk with a grunt. I hear his gun hit and skitter across the pavement away from us, but I can’t be too relieved.
My savior isn’t another police officer. It’s my best friend.
Jax knows as well as me not to attack him, but instinct kicks in as everything happens too fast.
Holt catches Jax in the calf with a Taser, stunning him long enough to knock him to the ground. Jax doesn’t move, but Holt still scrambles across the pavement to recover his gun.
When he stands up, he’s past the back bumper of his car, letting the light hit him enough that I catch the slight hitch in his giddyup.
Looks like someone’s got a trick knee.
Jax doesn’t miss it either. Before Holt can center the gun on him, my friend slams the heel of his foot into the side of the officer’s calf just below that knee.
It’s followed by a sickening crack and Holt crumpling to the ground, screaming.
He blindly throws his arm back and fires off a shot towards Jax as my friend runs towards me, but the bullet hits the cruiser instead.
Thank fuck.
Jax pulls me off the pavement, and despite everything we’ve both been taught, we’re prepared to run.
I’m not sure if it’s Holt’s screaming or the gunshot that earned us some attention, but two officers are charging our way, firearms drawn and yelling at us to get down on the ground.
We both do as we’re told, raising our hands and dropping to our knees before lowering ourselves face-first to the sidewalk.
Holt keeps screaming at the other officers to arrest us, and—to no one’s shock—they do as he says, reading our Miranda Rights and getting us in cuffs.
Headlights from a car parked down the street turn on, along with the engine, and the vehicle does a u-turn, presenting me with a clear side profile of its model as it drives under the street light.
It’s a Tesla.
Not the kind of car you see around these parts.
But I recognize that vehicle all the same. It’s the exact make and model my father’s entire security staff drives.
Only…
They have a new employer now.
That. Fucking. Cunt.